Saturday, 18 July 2009

Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!

The Beastie Boys taped at Madison Square Garden by fifty odd audience members equipped with handheld video cameras. Lo-fi lensing in order to better capture the full range of the concert going experience. Interludes include: excitedly nipping out to take a whizz, and one patron buying what looks like hermetically sealed beers. Not particularly pretty, Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! instead projects an authenticity, right down to obscured, inconvenient vantage point seating.

Actual track construction is completely dismantled by Mixmaster Mike, cue specific music typically flying off on wild tangents that include aural homages to other NYC hip-hop royalty. All the while the group soldiers through, dropping extra swears for the faithful. The set's a goody - managing to include, and celebrate, nearly all of the band's broad genre noodling (No Country Mike though) - particularly welcome is a mini The In Sound From Way Out set, the band dressed up for a powder blue, Hawaiian wedding jam.

Awesome goes into meltdown for a encore of three classics: Intergalactic as guerrilla rap-warfare - each of The Beastie Boys retreating, running around backstage, then bursting out through different entrance doors, better to run through the crowd screaming the kaiju-invasion monstahstompah. Gratitude disintegrates into 60s vintage acid-art rock, taking on visual motifs common to Kirby / Steranko pop comics. Sabotage ends the show with red alert rock apocalypse. Sped up to Ramones levels at times, some lines even delivered with breathless Cali-punk drawl.